Pittsburgh Cemeteries

A marble recording angel whose businesslike attitude suggests to Father Pitt that she is checking boxes on a printed form. There are no inscriptions on the monument and no Bayer grave markers near it, so Father Pitt cannot date it except to say that it looks like the sort of thing that would have been put up in the beginning of the twentieth century. It is even possible that the plot was never used; we have seen examples of families that bought cemetery plots and put up monuments to themselves, and then moved elsewhere.

in memory of
George Dickson
Who died Dec. the 8th A.D.1817
in the 83d, year of his age.
Also of
Rachel Dickson his wife
Who died May A.D. the 20th
1798 in the 47th year of her age.

These are probably the parents of the Agness Dickson who died in 1799 and is buried next to them. Their stone was cut by the same craftsman who cut Agness’ stone, whom we call the Master of the Curly G. Here, however, he has done much more elaborate work, which may be explained by his having had eighteen years of experience since Agness’ stone. The decorations are something new, and the individual letters seem more neatly made.

This tombstone gives us very good evidence of how our early stonecutters did their work. We can still see the lines scratched into the stone with a straightedge to align the letters. But it is equally plain that the stonecutter did not first trace the letters with chalk or any other impermanent material: he made his lines, and then he just started writing. If it were not so, he would not have been taken by surprise when he came to the end of a line and had no room for the E in “wife.” He would not have left out the day of the month in Rachel’s inscription, then realized his mistake, shrugged, and stuck it in after “A.D.” And this seems to be the almost universal practice of the stonecutters of two centuries ago: they never drew the inscription first before cutting it, but launched straight into cutting the letters, dealing with errors in any clumsy way that occurred to them.

Now, it is quite possible that Agness’ stone was cut at the same time as this one, rather than when she died in 1799. In favor of that proposition we have these arguments:

1. Both stones were cut by the same craftsman (but, on the other hand, local craftsmen often worked for decades in the same cemetery).
2. Rachel, who died in 1798, apparently did not have a stone until her husband George died, so it is reasonable to suppose that Agness might not have had one either.

There are enough differences between the work on this stone and the work on Agness’, however, including the decorations and (in Father Pitt’s eyes) much neater individual letters, to suggest that the stonecutter might have been considerably older and more experienced when he cut this stone. Old Pa Pitt regards the matter as worthy of further investigation.

Presumably “Theo” is an abbreviation for Theodore, though it could also be Theobald or Theophilus. This is a standard rusticated Doric mausoleum with a good Sacred Heart window.

in memory of
Agnesſ Dickson
Who died feb. the 11th A.D.
1799 in the 21ſt year of her
age

If this stone was cut when Agness Dickson died in 1799, then it is one of the oldest legible grave markers in the Pittsburgh area. Father Pitt is not sure that it was not put up later, however; it could have been cut at the same time as her parents’ stone in 1817.

Robinson Run Cemetery is a fairly large cemetery near McDonald. It includes a fourteen-acre burying ground that obviously goes back to the 1700s, and many interesting tombstones may be seen there.

The work of this stonecutter is distinctly recognizable, and he has left a few other stones in the same graveyard. His most distinctive quirk is his habit of making a lower-case G like a curly number 3. Following our usual custom, therefore, we shall call him the Master of the Curly G.

On this stone he has made use of the long S twice, and in both cases he gets it wrong. He uses it for the second member of the double S in “Agness,” when it should be the first; and he uses it in the ordinal “21st,” but makes it shorter than the T following (it should be longer, since the long S should have the same dimensions as a lower-case F).

Note the spelling “Agness,” by the way, which seems to have been the usual spelling of that name among the early settlers of western Pennsylvania.

St. Mary’s Cemetery, on a steep hill overlooking McKees Rocks, is one of the most ethnically diverse smaller cemeteries we have. It seems to have been shared by several Catholic parishes in McKees Rocks back in the days when Catholics segregated themselves by ethnic heritage. Some parts of the cemetery developed as little ethnic neighborhoods, and you can often tell the ethnicity of the neighborhood by the shapes of the monuments.

Curiously, the Italians and the East Europeans tend to have the same taste in monuments: cross-topped tombstones with gracefully curved shoulders and, frequently, a photograph of the deceased. Some of these pictures have succumbed to the ravages of the elements or vandalism, but a surprising number remain fresh-looking today. Here is a young Italian woman who died at the age of about 22 almost a century ago, and we can still see her face as clearly as if she sat for her portrait yesterday.

Father Pitt was not able to read the whole inscription, which has weathered badly. He was able to make out the name “Marta Formoso” (he is almost certain that the Christian name is not “Maria”) and the dates somethingth of April 1895 and somethingth of March 1917. The epitaph is mostly illegible, except for the words on the right-hand side; something about a flower and being sorrowful and memory. In a different light the rest of the inscription might come to life.

From the dates Father Pit guesses that these are two brothers, both of whom died in their twenties six years apart. Clearly the same stonecutter did the exceptionally neat lettering on both stones: all-capitals tombstones are unusual in the 1830s, and note the graceful curve of the bottom stroke in the letter E, the reduced size of the line “WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE,” and the straight underline under the “TH” in ordinal numbers. We shall call this artist the Master of the Bethany Capitals.

A certain strain of romanticism is common in monuments of the 1800s, but few go to such extremes of romanticism as this. The profusion of vine-covered vines overwhelms the composition so much that at first it is hard to make any visual sense of the thing. How many different kinds of vines can you identify? Father Pitt finds at least passionflowers, morning glories, and ivy, and the top may be roses, although the erosion makes it hard to tell. If the enormous urn-flower at the foot end came from a vine, it was a vine that wants to eat you.

If there was ever an inscription, it is illegible now; but since the monument occupies a space in the Lewis family plot, we may presume that it belongs to some Lewis or other.

IN MEMORY
OF
MOSES COULTER
who departed this life
Dec 6th 1828 Aged 55 years

Bleſsed are the dead who die in the
Lord they rest from their labours; and
thir [sic] works do follow them

Broken in two but otherwise well preserved, this is a very good example of a ledger-type horizontal marker. The epitaph is an abridged version of Revelation 14:13. Note the long S in “Blessed”: although the long S was for all practical purposes extinct in print by the 1820s, it was still taught in handwriting copybooks that the first S in a double-S pair should be a long S.